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New Scientist Live

UK fracking wells get thumbs up from planners

Is fracking finally coming to the UK? Council officials in north-west England have today recommended giving the go-ahead to up to four exploratory wells near Blackpool.

The wells are planned by fracking company Cuadrilla on farmland outside the village of Little Plumpton. They will be used to test whether hydraulic fracturing can extract natural gas from shale rocks.

Although Lancashire county council’s planning officials backed these proposals, they rejected the company’s application for a second well field at nearby Roseacre.

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If elected councillors decide to back the recommendations at a meeting next week, they will face vocal opposition from green groups. Last year, protesters successfully forced the company to abandon similar plans at Balcombe in the southern English county of West Sussex. Since then, the Lancashire plans have become test cases for whether fracking will go ahead in the UK.

Fracking has support from the British government, which sees onshore gas as a replacement for diminishing reserves beneath the North Sea.

However, the Lancashire planners focused in their report on local issues, such as increased levels of traffic that would result from fracking activities.

They rejected the Roseacre proposals on the basis that it would create an “unacceptable” rise in local traffic, but supported the Little Plumpton project after Cuadrilla made promises about protecting local streams and keeping night-time noise down.

Greenpeace energy campaigner Daisy Sands says the decision should not be about technicalities. “It’s a stark choice between protecting communities and working towards a clean-energy future, or sacrificing all this for the sake of an unproven and risky industry that may never deliver,” she says.

Article amended on 17 June 2015

Contrary to what the headline of this article originally said, these are not the first exploratory fracking wells in the UK.